Meditation = relaxation. It is not about concentration, it’s actually about de-concentration. It’s not about focusing one’s thoughts on one thing, but instead on becoming thoughtless. Why is this good for us? A calm mind, good concentration, better clarity, improved communication, relaxation and rejuvenation of the mind and body to list just a few. These are all things we would like to experience, but what about the health benefits? When you meditate these amazing things will happen to your body:

Now that we have gone over why we should meditate let’s talk about how…

Sit somewhere you’re comfortable. Sit cross-legged, or if you prefer, on a straight-backed chair with your feet flat on the floor, without leaning against the back of the chair.

Find a comfortable sitting posture. Place your hands palms-down on your thighs and sit in an upright posture with a straight back. Have your eyes open, let your gaze rest comfortably as you look slightly downward about six feet in front of you.

Follow your breath. Place your attention lightly on your out-breath, while remaining aware your environment. Be with each breath as the air goes out through your mouth and nostrils and dissolves into the space around you. At the end of each out-breath, take a rest until the next in-breath naturally begins. For a more focused meditation, you can follow both the out-breaths and in-breaths.

Whenever you notice that a thought, feeling, or perception has moved your attention away from the breath, just say to yourself, “thinking,” and return to following the breath. This Is normal, just note the thought and continue focusing on your breathing.

After the allotted time, you can consider your meditation practice period over. But there’s no need to give up any sense of calm, mindfulness, or openness you’ve experienced.

Triangle Pose is one of the best poses for your entire body, and one of Dr Beebe and Evan's personal favorites. Because of it's total body affects it can help prevent injury when used as a recovery position after a work out. Remember prior to working out you want to do large movements and active stretching to warm up the body. After you work out a stationary or static stretch like triangle pose is great for recovery. This pose will increase strength in the knee, thigh, core and ankle while it will stretch the hip, shoulder, knee, vertebral column, thigh, side body, spinal muscles, calf and groin.

As with all yoga poses it's more important to do them correctly rather than deeply so listen to your body and treat it right!

The Crescent Lunge, creates flexible strength, which promotes stability in the front and back of the torso, tones the lower body, stretches the chest, lungs, shoulders, arms, neck, belly, groins (psoas) and the muscles of the back. Which in turn, strengthens and stretches the thighs, calves and ankles.

Inflammation is part of the body’s immune response; without it, we can't heal. But when it's out of control for example, rheumatoid arthritis, it can damage the body. These types of health issues affect how we live our everyday lives. Inflammation is also thought to play a role in obesity, heart disease, and cancer. Other than medications there are ways to help fight inflammation! Here are some delicious foods to add to your weekly diet:

Fatty fish: Oily fish, like salmon, mackerel, tuna and sardines, are high in omega-3 fatty acids, which can help reduce inflammation. These fish can help men and woman fight heart disease. Aim to eat fish several times a week, make sure they are cooked in healthy ways!

Whole grains: Sorry we don’t mean Pasta and bread! Adding whole grains regular into your diet has shown to reduce levels of C-reactive protein. This is because whole grains have more fiber, which has been, a marker of inflammation in the blood. Make sure to look for foods in which the total number of carbohydrate grams per serving is fewer than 10 times the number of fiber gram.

Ginger: This root has a spicy kick and well known for its nausea calming powers, but it’s also holding another secret—inflammation crushing power. Studies have linked the root to lowered post-exercise inflammation and a drop in joint pain caused by the chronic inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. And osteoarthritis

Cherries: This might come as a surprise to ,but not only are they a great snack cherries hold an abundant about of anthocyanins (a type of phytonutrient) to help fight inflammation.

These are just a few foods that will help fight off rheumatoid arthritis and other harmful diseases. We want to remember to avoid harmful foods that are fried, high in salt, sugary foods, and certain types of oils. Adding these types of healthy foods and exercise will help your overall health!

Planks; you either love them or hate them! They are AMAZING at strengthening your core, which in turn, builds back strength to reduce lower back pain, improve balance, and perfect posture. A low plank (or elbow plank) helps strengthen your core by giving those abdominal muscles, more of a challenge since you aren't activating your shoulder & arm muscles to help hold yourself up as much as if you were performing a traditional high plank.

Check out our video below for proper form to help reduce back pain & improve posture!

We all have suffered from back pain at some point in our busy lives. Whether it was dull & annoying or more severe and debilitating, lower back pain is nothing to ignore. Here at Areté Chiropractic we are on a mission to not only help our patients be pain free, but to help educate everyone on ways they can manage and eliminate their pain through a healthy & active lifestyle.

The Baby Cobra Pose is one of the most basic poses in yoga for beginners. It is used to strengthen your spine and glute muscles as well as stretch out your chest, shoulders, and abs. We always stress to our patients is how important strength & flexibility are for a healthy back. By practicing the Cobra Pose with other back-related yoga poses, a patient can develop the ability to maintain correct body posture and improve back strength.

Happy Wellness Wednesday! WE ARE BACK! We had to take last week off to soak up our one year anniversary, which was SUCH a success and honestly overwhelming with the amount of love & support we received! Thank you to EVERYONE who has been there for us! We cannot wait to see what this next year brings for us and our patients!

So here we are, week 4 of Wellness Wednesday and we are talking all about balance this week. We preach a lot about keeping your body in balance for optimal health, but some people have a hard time with stability and balance because their core strength is weak. One way that we suggest combating that is practicing effective yoga poses, like the side plank. Done properly, the side plan strengthens your obliques and engages your back and legs. All of those large muscle groups working together correctly improves balance.

As we move into nicer weather, lots of us begin to think about be active outdoors and or getting that beach body back. As you start to increase activity here are a few things to keep in mind….

REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS: When getting back to movement, it’s important to consider how long you’ve been out of an exercise program. If you have been a couch potato for 3 months or more consider yourself starting from scratch! That’s right! Don’t just jump back into the workout routine that you were doing last time you were motivated. Begin with about 1/3 effort for the first week and then 2/3 effort the second and third week and at around the 4th week you can be back to where you left off. This scale gives your body time to adapt and that very important to prevent injury.

APPROPRIATE STRETCHING: When you are back in your workout routine, make sure you warm up your entire body with some cardio vascular exercise for about 5 minutes first and then spend another 5 minutes with dynamic stretching. This means moving your body through full ranges of motion to begin to loosen-up your joints and activate large muscle systems. Arm swings, squats, lunges and torso twists are some good ones to start with. After you have done your workout you should do some static stretching (holding stretches for specific muscle groups for a period of about 30-45 seconds). Static stretching after your workout helps to get rid of lactic acid that has built up during your workout. However doing static stretches on cold muscles can lead to injury… don’t do it!

STAY HYDRATED: We can’t stress this enough! Most Americans are chronically dehydrated, and if you’re getting out and being more active your body needs more water, and no; coffee, soda, energy drinks, and sugary “recovery” drinks like Gatorade DO NOT COUNT! Among many other benefits water will help your body recover faster from activity and keep your energy levels more steady during that activity.

Continuing our series of yoga poses that we LOVE for improving balance, aligning your spine, and keeping you healthy, another favorite one of ours is the plank pose.

Performed properly, the plank can increase flexibility, improve balance, reduce back pain, and elevate your mood.

1. Reduce Back Pain: According to the American Council on Exercise (ACE):2

“Because the plank exercise requires minimal movement while contracting all layers of the abdominal fascia, it is an excellent way to strengthen the core, which, in turn, helps reduce low-back pain.”

2. Improve Flexibility:

While building strength, planks also increase flexibility in your posterior muscle groups. The muscles around your shoulders, collarbone, and shoulder blades will expand and stretch (an area that often receives little attention), as will your hamstrings and even the arches of your feet and your toes.

3. Improving Your Mood:

Virtually every exercise has the potential to give you a mood boost, and planks are no exception. Planks are unique, however, in that they help stretch and ultimately relax muscles groups that often become stiff and tense from prolonged sitting. The tension release that planks provide is uplifting for your spirit.

4. Improving Balance & Posture:

To do a plank correctly, you must engage your abs to stay upright. Side planks or planks with extensions are particularly beneficial for building balance, as are planks performed on a stability ball. To test and strengthen your balance, try a side plank with a leg raise – get into side plank position, then lift your top leg and hold for one count. Lower it and repeat, then switch sides. In addition, planks work all the muscles you need to maintain proper posture, like your back, chest, shoulders, abs, and neck. If you do planks regularly, you’ll find you’re able to sit or stand up straighter with ease.

It has been fun reflecting on this past year. And I want to share what it took for the first couple of months. We have had our share of ups & downs but we always knew that we had a passion and a purpose to help others heal and it was worth the work to make it happen.

We were traveling from Seattle to New England with the only goal to be successful. We arrived in New England and prepared to start a life together. One of the first things we did was get married. My brilliant if acerbic sister and maid of honor for the wedding, pointed out during her speech that while we were both “Doctors” we were in fact ‘homeless’ ‘jobless’ and ‘living at grandma’s house’. ALL of this was completely true, and let me tell you, don’t knock living at grandma’s. The food there is the BEST you’ll ever have. However, three months later we did move out of Grandma’s house and moved up to the New Hampshire Seacoast area. And guess what… the first job I had, was shoveling horse shit, um, feces… no actually I mean shit.

The lease on the first rental space fell through and pushed our open date back another three months so in an effort to bring some money in, I would be up at 5 am and work at the horse barn until afternoon, then come home and work on the business plan. I’ve worked food service my entire life and had some connections in the Seacoast, I could have made more money in less smelly circumstances, but did I really want to be serving someone their martini on Friday night and trying to establish a professional relationship with them Monday morning? I think not. That and if you know me, you know that I love working with animals, particularly horses. However, I’m glad to say I’m done with that stop gap. So with hard work and lots of ups and downs we were well on the way to our dream.

Migraines, something that an estimated 37 million Americans suffer from, can prevent you from fully living the life that you want to. You may find that you have tried every remedy to alleviate the pain, but nothing seems to be working. But have you really tried EVERYTHING?!

Along with paying attention to your diet, drinking plenty of water, and maintaining a balanced life, keeping your spine in proper alignment is CRITICAL to being free from migraine pain.

Check out our video below for one of our favorite yoga poses that, done correctly, can help relieve migraines, calm the mind, and energize the body.

Life is all about balance, right? We want to balance work, life, fun, family, and our health. At times, it can be easy to overlook the most important way that we can improve our overall health, which is taking care of our bodies. When we treat our bodies with love & care, they will keep anxiety & stress at bay.

One way that many people reduce stress and try and keep their bodies in balance is by practicing yoga. Yoga is one of our preferred methods for making sure our spine is in proper alignment, which, in turn, keeps our bodies in balance.

Our ONE year anniversary as a business here in Portsmouth is FAST approaching and we wanted to take time time to reflect on everything that has brought us here and share it with you!

Here is an inside scoop from both of us!

From Mychal:

When I told my financial planner back in Seattle what I wanted to do she hurriedly tried to cover up the expression of shock and disbelief while simultaneously trying to think of a way to talk me out of my very ‘high risk’ plan. You see I had just told her that I was going to leave my 6 figure paying clinic in Seattle WA(which I had built from the ground up- but didn’t own) with my then boyfriend (also a chiropractor) to move across the country and open our own practice in Portsmouth NH. The New Hampshire location would allow us a couple of things; for myself, we would be closer to family, and in an area where we could purchase some land to have horses in the future, for my now husband, he would be close enough to the ocean to surf.

This was the 5th time that I personally have driven across the country, coast to coast, and each time I am awed by the North American Continent. The diversity of the landscape, the people and the feeling of each area. It teaches me new things every time. Yet when landing in New England I had a sense of homecoming, a knowing my heart that I arrived. Simultaneously I was gearing up for another birth. I had birthed a practice, a business, in Seattle and now, we were preparing for the same process again…

From Tyler:

After four years of practicing Blair upper cervical chiropractic in separate practices in Washington state my fiancé and I had decided to pack up and move across the country to start a new life. We were just starting to get comfortable in our lives in Seattle but we were missing the family component. So we decided to move closer to our family. It was August of 2015 and we had both just finished a three year post graduate program. We both then went through the process of handing off our practices to very capable doctors and saying goodbye to the patients we had grown to know and care for.

Our trip across the country had many stops along the way to visit friends and family of ours. Two weeks after we left Seattle we landed in Tolland, CT with our lives in a truck and our hopes and dreams starting to come true. On September 12th 2015 Mychal Beebe and I got married and celebrated with friends and family from all over the United States and Canada. Three days later we packed up and went to Costa Rica for four weeks taking our honeymoon knowing we were going to be working hard for at least the next 3-5 years with very little down time. Surfing, hiking, relaxing, and adventuring our way through Costa Rica. After four weeks we had climbed the tallest mountain in the country, traveled most of the west coast, hiked into the caldera of an extinct volcano, had surf lessons, and gotten robbed by capuchin monkeys.

When we got back to the states we quickly worked to find a place to live and work in the Seacoast. I had never been to the Seacoast before we moved and quite frankly I was very scared. I had done my research and was excited to live in a place that I could get to the ocean to surf and live in a city that was medium to small sized but full of good culture and good people. It took us a little while to find a place to live, and find a place to practice. Once we got settled we quickly got to work and by the last week of March 2016 we were ready and open for business.

It took us longer than we thought but once we were up and running everything was clicking and we haven’t looked back since!

A Discussion on the Mind-Eye Connection: as pioneered by Deb Zelinsky

Dr. Amy is affectionately called the Eyeball Coach, because she and her staff are able to coach people on how to use their eyes correctly. Through vision therapy they are able to overcome the vision problems that were interfering with their ability to achieve in life.

Dr. Amy graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Cognitive Science. She graduated from the New England College of Optometry in 1993 and was the first recipient of the Alumni Association Young Optometrist of the Year Award in 2003. She is past president and a current director of the New Hampshire Optometric Association, and past Healthy Eyes/Healthy People coordinator for the American Optometric Association (AOA) in New Hampshire. Dr. Amy also serves the local community as President of the Portsmouth Lions Club.

Join Dr. Amy, as she shares with prominent providers in the Seacoast about how our patient's vision is compromised with TBI, Vestibular problem, Post Concussion Syndrome and more, and how a specific visual rehabilitative therapy can drastically improve patient outcomes.

Have you been thinking about trying Chiropractic care for a while? This is the perfect opportunity. Dr's Evans and Beebe are partnering with Annie's Angels this Christmas to help both YOU and a CHILD in need! We are passionate about building out community and giving back which is why we are donating our services this year in exchange for a gift.

If your interested in finding out if we can help AND giving back this is what you do: Call the office and we'll give you the gender and age of a child in need and book you in for an hour's initial health history and spinal exam.

What you receive is $50 towards that initial consult and exam for the donation of your gift! Gifts should be around $20 range.

So give yourself the gift of health and help a child in need this Christmas.